On the Thursday edition of MSNBC’s All In, guest and longtime American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein showed his elitist disdain for the Founding Fathers and our constitutional government, bemoaning how less than half the U.S. population has a “super majority or close to it” in the U.S. Senate.
The liberal Republican first complained to host Chris Hayes about how things have gone “from bad to worse to even worse” for Republicans becoming, in his mind, too extreme with this GOP tax reform plan being the latest example.
“You know, I’ve thought for a long time, a lot of these Senators are friends of mine, Bob Corker, John McCain, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake and to watch people cave on something like this, not only not knowing what’s in it, but for John McCain, who had said passionately about a return to a regular way of legislating — the regular order, saying he’s going to vote for this, it really suggests a party that has gone completely rogue,” Ornstein fretted.
Ornstein kept voicing his scorn for the legislation, arguing that he’s “never seen a bill handled in this fashion...without any significant hearings” or floor debate (which isn’t true) in his “almost 50 years of being around the legislative process.”
All told, the AEI personality used the tax plan to bemoan how small states have the same level of representation in the Senate as larger ones, showing a “complete detachment from representatives from their own voters”:
We’ve been moving in that direction for a while, but the fact, you go past the Electoral College, gerrymandering, a Senate where 40 percent of the population controls the super majority or close to it of the Senate. The fact that you have such opposition to this from every expert group, from large numbers of people, and they don’t care anymore, all they care about is the large donors and an ideology that ignores facts. It’s just appalling.
Of course, this is the whole point of the U.S. Senate, as laid out in Article I of the Constitution while the House of Representatives is set-up just as Ornstein wishes with more populous states having more seats (and thus a larger voice).
Here’s the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes on November 30:
MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes
November 30, 2017
8:11 p.m. Eastern[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Property of Donald J. Trump]
CHRIS HAYES: Norm, you’ve been writing about — your earlier book is called Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. You’ve — I mean, you wrote that with Thomas Mann. You’ve been writing for a long time about sort of the ways in which the Republican Party has changed over the years and become more extreme. What does this moment mean in terms of the development of the party?
NORM ORNSTEIN: I think it’s taken it from bad to worse to even worse than that. You know, I’ve thought for a long time, a lot of these Senators are friends of mine, Bob Corker, John McCain, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake and to watch people cave on something like this, not only not knowing what’s in it, but for John McCain, who had said passionately about a return to a regular way of legislating — the regular order, saying he’s going to vote for this, it really suggests a party that has gone completely rogue and I’d make another point, Chris. In almost 50 years of being around the legislative process, I’ve never seen a bill handled in this fashion. Not only without any significant hearings, having it on the floor without even having a document, but the complete detachment from representatives from their own voters. We’ve been moving in that direction for a while, but the fact, you go past the Electoral College, gerrymandering, a Senate where 40 percent of the population controls the super majority or close to it of the Senate. The fact that you have such opposition to this from every expert group, from large numbers of people, and they don’t care anymore, all they care about is the large donors and an ideology that ignores facts. It’s just appalling.
